GAMEBYTES: No game exists for real people

Wednesday

Mar 12, 2014 at 6:00 PMMar 12, 2014 at 6:57 PM

I often struggle with the idea, or accusation, that games are little more than power fantasies, but at the same time I can appreciate the truth in that thought. Playing games usually does involve taking on the role of a person greater than ourselves, either more heroic or more capable or, at the very least, a participant in exciting, grandiose and very important scenarios.

By Phil OwenSpecial to Tusk

I often struggle with the idea, or accusation, that games are little more than power fantasies, but at the same time I can appreciate the truth in that thought. Playing games usually does involve taking on the role of a person greater than ourselves, either more heroic or more capable or, at the very least, a participant in exciting, grandiose and very important scenarios.

And there's nothing wrong with that, per se, and books and movies and TV shows do that same thing. But books and movies and TV shows don't always do that. Outside games, we get lots of stories about regular people doing regular-people things, and consumers enjoy them at the same rate they enjoy outlandish escapist action stories.Ken Levine, the creator of "BioShock," said a year or two ago that video games can't tell every kind of story, and my long-held response to him has been that games can tell more stories than they presently do. The scope of types of stories developers tell is expanding, but only on the fringe, really.

Telltale's "The Walking Dead" gets all the accolades, but nobody in major publishing circles is moving to emulate that style. And after David Cage made a Fincher-esque murder mystery in "Heavy Rain" that everyone seemed to love — and which sold pretty well, or at least to Cage's satisfaction — nobody else tried that kind of thing, either. Even Cage abandoned his own formula with his next game, which featured a more traditional world-saving plot.

This discussion is old hat for me, but what's been frustrating me most lately is that in saving the world, we always have to use a gun or a blade to do it. True power lies in being the person who points the weapon, and not the one who pulls the trigger, but games let us cheat by being both of those things all the time. All the game protagonists are Jack Bauer, basically.

The strategy genre is about being the pointer rather than the shooter, admittedly, but the scope of a game like "Crusader Kings" or "Civilization" is so far removed from the ground you're not really a character in the more freeform stories those types of games tell. Everything happens in menus, and you never get a truly epic verbal showdown that stories about nation-leaders in other media always contain. These games are impersonal.

In "Total War: Rome 2," developer Creative Assembly built a battlefield in which every individual soldier is unique in some way, from the way his shield has weathered to chips on his armor to the sigil on his chest. This is intended to add some personality to a series that has the largest scale battlefields of any game, but of course the game never rubs your face in the fact that each person on the ground is, in fact, a human character who behaves uniquely and dynamically. And most folks will never zoom in far enough during a fight to even see what I'm talking about.

All this is just my way of rolling around to yet another complaint about relatability. The dearth of playable women and queer characters is a problem, but honestly there's so little in any game that any of us can relate to in the most meaningful ways. I am not the characters I play, and I could never be one of them if I tried. That has nothing to do with gender or sexual orientation, but ability.

But, again, power fantasies aren't bad. But the percentage of games that are, and that don't attempt relatable situations alongside relatable people, is bad, however. And that's our life.